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jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
Published in Dallas Morning News, 20 March 2015 09:41 PM
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s remarkable debut story collection Night at the Fiestas, set mainly in tight-knit Catholic, Mexican-American communities in New Mexico, enthralls with tales of people striving to better their lives while enduring the aftermath of past mistakes. Those mistakes have a way of lingering visibly, emanating tension, often in the form of children of failed relationships.
Valdez Quade’s characters run the gamut of experience from an unmarried, uneducated, pregnant young woman who is somehow the linchpin of stability in the office of the Catholic church where she works (“Ordinary Sins”), to a man who returns to Albuquerque after his grandmother’s death to find his deadbeat dad and a pregnant boa constrictor squatting in her guest house (“Guest House”). There’s also a wealthy white woman from the East Coast who moves to New Mexico and hires a Latina housekeeper, whom she attempts to absorb as a family member (“Canute Commands the Tides”).
In the masterful “The Five Wounds,” a man named Amadeo Padilla makes an unlikely Jesus, chosen to carry a heavy cross in a Holy Week re-enactment of Christ’s Passion that the men of a New Mexico town organize every year. “Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck.”
Valdez Quade writes this story in present tense, amping up the immediacy and building suspense over whether Amadeo will choose to ask for nails to be pounded into his hands, as one legendary town Jesus portrayer did decades before. Amadeo is a loser in need of redemption: jobless, living at home with his mother ever since he abandoned his daughter Angel, who nevertheless turns up at Amadeo’s mother’s house, 15 and pregnant, looking for a place to stay.
In Valdez Quade’s skilled hands, the familiar Catholic tropes of penitence, grace and redemption, which could so easily become heavy-handed, feel fresh, funny and loose. “I’m carrying the cross this year,” Amadeo says when Angel arrives on his doorstep. “I’m Jesus.”
“And I’m the Virgin Mary,” Angel replies, her pregnant “belly as hard and round as an adobe horno.”
Catholicism mingles with Southwestern folk beliefs such as La Llorona and mal de ojo, the evil eye, to produce a potent thematic stew in this collection, which features several young women trying to break free of the burden of their heritage. In the title story, it’s 1960 and good girl Frances rides on the bus her father drives between Raton and Santa Fe to meet her bolder, prettier cousin for the annual fiestas “celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’ retaking of Santa Fe.” Drunken revelry in the plaza is in the offing.
“If Frances’ life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended,” Valdez Quade writes, “then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.” Something does, in the form of an insulting beatnik, but it leaves Frances more unsettled than invigorated.
A contemporary striver stars in “Jubilee.” Andrea, the daughter of a field-hand supervisor on a California blueberry farm, returns from her freshman year at Stanford to attend a high-class party on the farm of her dad’s boss. Andrea’s dad has been trying to earn extra money through a burrito truck, and they’ve hired him to serve at the party, while Andrea aims to humble the boss’s daughter, also a Stanford student, who has snubbed her on occasion.
As Andrea commits gaffe after gaffe, Valdez Quade brings the reader to empathize with the awkwardness of her position. Andrea, she writes, would “forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world.”
No one gets off easy in Valdez Quade’s fiction. All her characters grapple with moral questions that circumstances force them to face head on rather than brush off or ignore. Valdez Quade is a gifted storyteller with an eye for quirky, compelling detail, and her first story collection is a poised and polished debut.
Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150320-short-stories-review-night-at-the-fiestas-by-kirstin-valdez-quade.ece
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s remarkable debut story collection Night at the Fiestas, set mainly in tight-knit Catholic, Mexican-American communities in New Mexico, enthralls with tales of people striving to better their lives while enduring the aftermath of past mistakes. Those mistakes have a way of lingering visibly, emanating tension, often in the form of children of failed relationships.
Valdez Quade’s characters run the gamut of experience from an unmarried, uneducated, pregnant young woman who is somehow the linchpin of stability in the office of the Catholic church where she works (“Ordinary Sins”), to a man who returns to Albuquerque after his grandmother’s death to find his deadbeat dad and a pregnant boa constrictor squatting in her guest house (“Guest House”). There’s also a wealthy white woman from the East Coast who moves to New Mexico and hires a Latina housekeeper, whom she attempts to absorb as a family member (“Canute Commands the Tides”).
In the masterful “The Five Wounds,” a man named Amadeo Padilla makes an unlikely Jesus, chosen to carry a heavy cross in a Holy Week re-enactment of Christ’s Passion that the men of a New Mexico town organize every year. “Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck.”
Valdez Quade writes this story in present tense, amping up the immediacy and building suspense over whether Amadeo will choose to ask for nails to be pounded into his hands, as one legendary town Jesus portrayer did decades before. Amadeo is a loser in need of redemption: jobless, living at home with his mother ever since he abandoned his daughter Angel, who nevertheless turns up at Amadeo’s mother’s house, 15 and pregnant, looking for a place to stay.
In Valdez Quade’s skilled hands, the familiar Catholic tropes of penitence, grace and redemption, which could so easily become heavy-handed, feel fresh, funny and loose. “I’m carrying the cross this year,” Amadeo says when Angel arrives on his doorstep. “I’m Jesus.”
“And I’m the Virgin Mary,” Angel replies, her pregnant “belly as hard and round as an adobe horno.”
Catholicism mingles with Southwestern folk beliefs such as La Llorona and mal de ojo, the evil eye, to produce a potent thematic stew in this collection, which features several young women trying to break free of the burden of their heritage. In the title story, it’s 1960 and good girl Frances rides on the bus her father drives between Raton and Santa Fe to meet her bolder, prettier cousin for the annual fiestas “celebrating 268 years since de Vargas’ retaking of Santa Fe.” Drunken revelry in the plaza is in the offing.
“If Frances’ life was to be a novel — as Frances fully intended,” Valdez Quade writes, “then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.” Something does, in the form of an insulting beatnik, but it leaves Frances more unsettled than invigorated.
A contemporary striver stars in “Jubilee.” Andrea, the daughter of a field-hand supervisor on a California blueberry farm, returns from her freshman year at Stanford to attend a high-class party on the farm of her dad’s boss. Andrea’s dad has been trying to earn extra money through a burrito truck, and they’ve hired him to serve at the party, while Andrea aims to humble the boss’s daughter, also a Stanford student, who has snubbed her on occasion.
As Andrea commits gaffe after gaffe, Valdez Quade brings the reader to empathize with the awkwardness of her position. Andrea, she writes, would “forever be checking ethnicity boxes, emphasizing her parents’ work: farm laborer, housekeeper. Trying to prove that she was smart enough, committed enough, pleasant enough, to be granted a trial period in their world.”
No one gets off easy in Valdez Quade’s fiction. All her characters grapple with moral questions that circumstances force them to face head on rather than brush off or ignore. Valdez Quade is a gifted storyteller with an eye for quirky, compelling detail, and her first story collection is a poised and polished debut.
Jenny Shank’s novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20150320-short-stories-review-night-at-the-fiestas-by-kirstin-valdez-quade.ece
simplyb's review against another edition
4.0
A book of short stories whose common thread is the Southwest United States and told (mostly) from a female perspective, it uses the sublime but barren harshness of the desert to highlight the struggles of mostly women, primarily those of Native/Hispanic origin, and reflects on their humanness and their failings, there situational hopelessness and their fights against, and sometimes relenting to, being broken. Told with a straightforwardly eloquent prosody, you can't help but ache for each character who tells you her story. For that reason, this was a bit of a hard book to read as you knew that everybody was inevitably going to be succumbing to the weight of the world in their own way. But each story had flashes of self-awareness and growth, of insight into the perpetual battles we as humans wage against and in spite of ourselves, and as such provided fodder for thought, a blossom within the sandy reaches of the New Mexican and surrounding desert landscape.
meghan_is_reading's review against another edition
Geeze, every story is like a bruise to the heart. Good but man, don't read em all at once.
adrirose's review against another edition
5.0
Full of ordinary, devastating tragedies. Beautifully clear.
beebottoms's review against another edition
5.0
Kirsten Valdez Quade writes her narrative and dialogue like a spread of butter on toast, seamlessly connected and constantly enjoyable. I'm probably overreaching my own abilities but I feel like she writes in a style very much like mine - or at least the style I love to write and want to write. That's a big reason why I'm so drawn to her stories here. Her first sentences grab me and the rest of the stories continue to pull me in in very straightforward, honest language that I can only describe as bright and sharp. The writing is energetic, youthful and perceptive. It's a very contemporary voice that I've been looking for! Maybe it's because most of her protagonists are interesting young females, but all the characters are colorfully portrayed.
Most of the stories are about family relationships especially between parent(s) and child. I love love love the first story 'Nemecia'. There's a brilliant air of mischief surrounding a pretty simple premise. Others I really love are 'The Five Wounds', 'Night at the Fiestas', 'Jubilee' and 'Family Reunion'. The others are wonderful too, each one unique. Except for the last story, 'The Manzanos' - that one was quite all over the place.
One thing about the writing that stuck out oddly a bit, to me, was how the author ended most of the stories. The endings were pretty abrupt and confusing... But maybe it's just my poor understanding. Great debut collection! I can't wait to read more from the author :)
Most of the stories are about family relationships especially between parent(s) and child. I love love love the first story 'Nemecia'. There's a brilliant air of mischief surrounding a pretty simple premise. Others I really love are 'The Five Wounds', 'Night at the Fiestas', 'Jubilee' and 'Family Reunion'. The others are wonderful too, each one unique. Except for the last story, 'The Manzanos' - that one was quite all over the place.
One thing about the writing that stuck out oddly a bit, to me, was how the author ended most of the stories. The endings were pretty abrupt and confusing... But maybe it's just my poor understanding. Great debut collection! I can't wait to read more from the author :)
caribbeangirlreading's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
All but one story is set in northern New Mexico, with mostly Latinx characters at their core. The sense of place is so strong that New Mexico itself is a central character in all the stories. There is also a strong sense of faith and religion through many of the stories, but it’s not the Catholicism practiced by white Anglos, but a faith is very rooted in New Mexican history and traditions.
Many of the stories end abruptly but it feels right. Most of the characters live in poverty, both the financial and the spiritual kind. Their lives will not have happy endings so why even try to tie up the story with a pretty bow?
My favorite story was Nemecia. My least favorite story was Family Reunion, about a young girl living in Salt Lake City who wants to convert to the Latter-Day Saints Church so that she can fit in with her school friends. The story was just out of place in this collection, both geographically and culturally. The Five Wounds short story is the basis for Valdez’ 2021 novel of the same name.
Overall, Night at the Fiestas was vivid, intense, and impeccably written.
Many of the stories end abruptly but it feels right. Most of the characters live in poverty, both the financial and the spiritual kind. Their lives will not have happy endings so why even try to tie up the story with a pretty bow?
My favorite story was Nemecia. My least favorite story was Family Reunion, about a young girl living in Salt Lake City who wants to convert to the Latter-Day Saints Church so that she can fit in with her school friends. The story was just out of place in this collection, both geographically and culturally. The Five Wounds short story is the basis for Valdez’ 2021 novel of the same name.
Overall, Night at the Fiestas was vivid, intense, and impeccably written.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Death of parent, Emotional abuse, Grief, Gun violence, Pregnancy, Self harm, and Toxic relationship
princessfabulous's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
catstonelibrary's review against another edition
challenging
dark
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Writing was very good, but I’m not a fan of short stories and, unfortunately, this book didn’t change my mind. Just getting to know characters and then story ended.
icameheretoread's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this book. It's very rare for me to give 5 stars to any short story collection written by anyone but George Saunders, but Quade had me mesmerized with her characters. Each story is so real and layered that they beg to be read over and over again (which I may do when I have time later in the year). The female leads are kickass, broken, shy, brave, outspoken, good and bad mothers wrapped up into one and daughters of a similar grey area. Just gorgeous and really, really realistic. Mojave Rats stands out as my clear favorite, followed by Night at the Fiestas. I also adored Canute Commands the Tides because I had no idea of where it was going and I was glad to find out I can still be surprised. I'm not going to lie: I was scared to death of where Family Reunion was going. Enough. Sorry. It's an awesome read.
tracy2_0's review against another edition
5.0
While reading these stories I was filled with a longing, not one of dissatisfaction but of a quiet sense of knowing that the gray areas of life are just that, gray, blurred and often without answers.